


Dawn and Resurrection

by ooinugirloo



Series: Nations, Like Stars [2]
Category: Star Trek
Genre: Angst, Blood, Gen, Kid Fic, Tarsus IV, allusions to child abuse/neglect, brief descriptions of genocide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 13:01:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ooinugirloo/pseuds/ooinugirloo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your world has burned to the ground, everything you loved is ashes and dust. You are fractured, wavering like a mirage. But you're still alive. Now all that's left to do is carry on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dawn and Resurrection

**Author's Note:**

> This story's existence is due in large part to Katey's encouragement--without it, this story would have probably floated around, half-formed, in my mind indefinitely. I hope you like it! <3

You’re 13 and _can’t feel anything_ —

The first time you wake, you don't know where you are. In a millisecond you take in the unmistakable twinge of a needle in your forearm and panic, ripping it out of your body. You twist, ignoring the snapping-crunch of your spine and ribs protesting the sudden movement, and drop to the cold, slick floor. Your bare feet slip on the too-smooth surface and you come down hard on your knees and palms, biting down hard on your lip so you don’t cry out. In an awkward, animal crouch you skitter instinctively for the door, managing to pull yourself onto two legs as you barrel out into the hallway. Your senses are muted, your eyesight fuzzy. Your head swims, vertigo encroaching, but you push it away, thinking only to escape and find your children. You dodge unknown bodies in the hall, fighting out of the grasps of the few that manage to catch you. You’re panting by the time you make it into an open area with doors leading outside, shivering and sweating. You lunge for the doors, reaching your hand out to the light. You touch the handle and your whole body jerks, muscles seizing, the buzzing of electricity rattling your teeth. You slump to the floor, twitching, vision darkening, as dim figures encircle you, hearing fading out. _“Jesus Christ, get him back to his room! That kid is a monster!”_

You’re 14 and _can’t believe in anyone_ —

What they’ve told you is this: you are a traumatized survivor of an attack by a madman; you are malnourished and in a Starfleet hospital, on Earth, in San Francisco; your children are safe, in the same hospital, in their own rooms; and most of all, repeated ad nauseam until you snarl your animal snarl and flash your hollow eyes, _you are safe_. They want you to believe the ultimate lie—that a safe place exists. Never once in your 14 years of life have you ever been safe. Born in space amid the debris of your father’s last seconds and the shells of photon torpedoes, living stranded alone in limbo with an angry alcoholic, running for your life on a hostile planet was just the latest in a string of events that have made you who you are. You _don’t/can’t/won’t_ believe them. You scream until they bring you your children, until you can touch each of their faces, hear each of their voices. One by one they leave, retrieved by family, all coming to say goodbye, clutching at you and sucking in deep, heaving breaths like they could swallow you down and take you with them.  You wish they could—they are a part of you now, as much as your arms and legs, and each time you lose one it feels like an amputation. You’ve borne all manner of pain before this, but this is the worst. It’s the death of the last thing that was pure and good in you. Even if you had been allowed to eat, you wouldn’t be able to—sickened by the thought, wasting away from grief. You fade in and out of consciousness, often sedated by nurses who spook at your dead eyes and sunken cheeks. You only know how old you are because they wheeled in a cart with a cupcake on it, single candle flickering weakly in the too-cold sterility of your room, nurses trying to mask their unease in a quavering refrain _“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday, dear James—”_ until you lunge for the side of your bed, retching painfully. Your birthdays have only ever left behind corpses. Behind your tightly clenches eyelids you see your father, Aunt Emmy, Uncle Rick, and Chuck holding hands, bodies torn apart, lips stretched over bloody smiles, eye sockets black and empty, crooning _“Happy Birthday to you…”_

(You’re 13 and _can’t breathe, can’t sleep, can’t think_ —

You’re a wild thing, feral, sharp as shattered glass. Your entire body is a weapon—you have blood under your nails, smeared across your skinny torso, dripping from long-forgotten wounds—and the only thing you know anymore is fear, surviving by baring your crimson teeth in a hyena smile. You try to keep this side of you away from the children. You wonder if you’re going insane. A million years ago you read about it in books: psychosis, schizophrenia, trauma and its effects on the brain, PTSD, DID, a thousand other acronyms that seemed so far away written in crisp black ink in safe, familiar textbooks. But now you see it. You can feel it, clawing at you with fingers like knives, whispering in your ear with cold lips and a forked tongue. _“You’re a monster,”_ it hisses _“you think you’re protecting them? You’re going to be the one to kill them, in the end. You kill everything you touch.”_ There’s no way for you to escape its sneering, you look away, plug your ears, scream until your throat is raw, but you can always feel its thin fingers on the back of your neck. You can feel yourself shaking apart, you know it’s a matter of time before you self-destruct. For now, you dig your ragged fingernails into your palms and let the pain ground you. Your job isn’t over.) 

You’re 14 and you wonder if you didn’t really die back there.

What they haven’t told you is this: you’ve spent 7 months in the hospital and no one has come to collect you; you are always going to have strange habits around food—eating quickly, hoarding, refusal to eat certain things, difficulty sharing food, the tendency to overeat—and more allergies than you thought it was possible to survive with; you will always have nightmares that are more memory than fiction, will always be paranoid and hyper-vigilant, ill-equipped for forming relationships with other people; and as you grow physically stronger you become more of a liability for the hospital—more mangy stray than boy with no compunctions about doing harm—and your time there is growing short. You don’t need them to tell you any of this. You already know. When the time comes, they bring you a comm unit and tell you to call your family. You lift the earpiece to your ear, pinching it in place against your jaw with a bony shoulder, and punch in numbers from memory, fingers clumsy. It isn’t a surprise to you when you hear a generic female voice telling you _“I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please hang up, or try again.”_ but you exhale sharply anyway, eyes stinging. You tell the nurse that no one was home, and that you’ll try again tomorrow. It’s not the first lie you’ve told them, but it is the last. You slip out of the hospital that night with the clothes on your back and a pillowcase stuffed full of food slung over your shoulder, silent as any ghost.

(You’re 13 and wonder if anyone even knows you're here.

It’s been weeks since you were sentenced to death, and life has fallen into a grim rhythm. You split your 9 children up into 3 shifts of 3—you are the oldest, you take the night shift along with Synis, who is largely nocturnal, and Khris, who always liked the dark. The youngest two, Kevin and Marcie, and the second-oldest, Thomas, take the dawn-to-noon shift, when all is quiet. Noelle, Rodger, and Alex then take the noon-to-dark rotation, everyone with orders to wake you if anything stirs within eye or earshot. You usually hunt and scavenge in the night and then stay up through the morning, making things for your children. You weave pallets for them to sleep on from leaves and vines you find in the forest. You stock up on firewood, build a rudimentary chimney system through the caves, so the smoke doesn’t lead back to you. You teach the children arithmetic and problem-solving skills whenever you have a spare moment. You try to make sure that when— _if, always if, nothing is certain, least of all survival_ —they get out of this, _this_ isn’t all they know. You teach the eldest to fight, and the youngest to run, because whether you like it or not, that is something they need to know. You teach them how to disappear in the forests and the caves, how to boil plants to make them edible, how to live when everyone wants you dead. You wish you could teach them how to be kind, but no one ever taught you, and you figure they’ll have the opportunity to learn that later, so long as they’re alive. So you live by unlearning civility, by throwing away everything but each other, all other things unnecessary to survival. You become the leader of a pack of wild dogs, licking each other’s wounds and scratching at the dirt for something to eat. That’s what life here has done to you. You think once, maybe, a lifetime ago, you weren’t scared—maybe you were even happy. You can’t remember it now.)

You’re 14 and you wonder if everyone feels like they have a black hole in their chest.

You were always too large for your small frame—your mind too big for your skull, heart too big for your chest. You survive, because that is what you _do_ , but you wish you didn’t. You are a textbook case, too broken to be able to fit back into society and resorting to living on the fringes. You keep tabs on your children—even though they may have been others’ first, they are _yours_ now and you will never forget that, never leave them, as long as there is breath in your lungs. For the most part they are unaware of your silent guardianship, you sneak aboard a cruiser headed in the right direction and then walk the rest of the way, watch them from afar for a few hours, unseen, making sure they are happy and whole (in ways you aren’t, have never been, but you want that for them, your children who have seen so much blood and death but are still whole, infinitely more precious for their fragility) then move on to the next. The only time you’re spotted is the first time you go to see little Kevin Riley, the youngest of your charges. He was staring out his window, watching the road as you approached; throwing the door open and running out helter-skelter, arms outstretched, jumping at you and clutching you to him, sobbing into your shoulder. You bury your nose in his short blond hair, breathing in his sweet babyish scent, purer and more concentrated now without the overpowering stench of fear and death and refuse, but otherwise unchanged. _“JT!”_ he manages, shakily, _“Everyone keeps giving me all this food and toys and trying to touch me and hug me all the time and I don’t like it, but they look really sad when I tell them to stop. I’m always scared even though I’m home now, everything’s scary without you here!”_ He looks up at you beseechingly, asking you to fix everything on Earth the same way you fixed everything on Tarsus. But Earth isn’t Tarsus, and you don’t have the first idea how to live here, maybe you never did. Maybe you’re better suited to the savagery of a dying planet than the subtlety of a living one. You’ve never been able to do anything but your best when faced with those eyes, though, so you pet his hair and whisper soothing lies to him, telling him it’ll get easier, you’re not in danger anymore, Tarsus’ll be nothing more than a bad memory soon. You also tell him the truth: that you love him, and that nothing will ever hurt him again as long as you’re there. He hugs you tighter still (the strength in those thin arms disproportionate to how small he is, a hard won strength, forged clinging to your back as you ran from demons wearing men’s skins, shoving at the darkness around him with all of his might) and tells you his parents got him a portable comm, so that he can always call for help, and slips its number in your pocket, telling you to call him if you ever need him. You draw back, looking into his wide, earnest eyes, and feel tears slipping down your face for the first time since you crawled out of hell. You kiss him on the forehead, a benediction, and promise him that you will. On your way out of town you buy a portable comm and enter one number into the contacts, no name. You send one message before pocketing the device and slipping onto a cruiser going god-knows-where: _‘I’m here, Kev. I’ll always be here for you.’_

You’re 16 and you’re back to being your father’s son. 

You wind up back in Riverside for no reason other than your morbid curiosity. It’s night when you walk up to the dusty farmhouse you were raised in and everything is as you remember—empty, dark, and cold. There are no lights on, no signs of life. The porch’s paint is peeling and yellowed, the fence has slats missing, and the gate is hanging ajar. No one has cared about this house for many years, and for the first time, you feel a connection with it. Your eyes flick up to the eaves of the house where you know the attic is, your hand coming up to brush absentmindedly against the pendant hanging against your sternum. You curl your fist around it, wondering how everything came full circle, how you somehow kept this one precious thing when you’ve managed to lose all others. You see him there, for a moment, like you did as a child, an apparition on the sagging porch. He smiles at you sadly, that crooked smile you’ve seen so many times but never witnessed. You bite your tongue, close your eyes, turn your back. There’s nothing but ghosts behind you now, and nothing left for you here. 

(You’re 13 and your back is to the wall.

You’ve been caught. You were scavenging in the houses near the edge of the forest—when everyone was either exterminated or relocated the houses farthest from the capitol were systematically emptied, allowing opportunists to gather all the food that was left behind. Comestibles were snatched up quickly, but everything else remained largely untouched. Medical supplies could often be found in pristine condition, a small mercy that saved your children’s lives more than a few times. Marcie had been sniffling for a few days, but last night her fever spiked, prompting you to go in search of something to help her. You didn’t count on the presence of guards, though, as they rarely ventured this far from the remaining live population of Tarsus. There are two of them and they cage you in like a rat, advancing on you with smirks twisting their doughy faces. They don’t even bother reaching for their guns, so used to docile, weeping prey that they can’t conceive of resistance. You wait until they come close enough to stretch out their hands to you, tucking your feet under you and launching yourself straight at the chest of the closer one, your hands closing around his throat like vices. You shove at him, your bodyweight making him overbalance, and when he topples, slam his head down on the slick floor of the kitchen with a dull crack. He doesn’t move, and you don’t look at him, don’t think, you just take off for the door, hoping that the other guard will waste time checking on his partner rather than chase you. You quickly remember what sort of men these guards are, though, when the live one doesn’t spare a glance at the body on the floor and pulls his gun on you, grazing your arm and your ribs on his first and fourth shots. The phaser burns don’t slow you much, but it’s enough for the guard to catch up in a few long strides, wrapping a big, meaty hand around your wrist and tugging viciously. You sprawl in the dirt, breath punching out of you on impact, and staying out when a thick-soled boot presses down heavily on your chest. You thrash like a hooked fish, only stilling after he bends down and punches you in the face, sneering at you to _“Know your place, brat! Stop wriggling or I’ll do more than just fire a round through your skull!”_ You wheeze, fighting back the darkness encroaching on you with pure rage. You have not survived for this long to let some asshole kill you for kicks. You aren’t just living for yourself, you have the children now—they need you, and _you are not done_. You keep his attention focused on your top half, grabbing and clawing at his leg, soundlessly shifting your weight to one bent leg and kicking straight up with the other, aiming for the one weak spot accessible to you. Thankfully, despite being rail thin, your legs are long and they make contact with the crux of the guard’s legs solidly. He pales in an instant, making a noise halfway between a grunt and a whimper, crumpling to the dusty ground next to you. You scramble upwards, chest heaving, and grab his phaser from pain-limp fingers, flipping the barrel so that the red glow illuminates the prone man’s temple. You pause for only a moment to steady your grip before pulling the trigger, watching the spray of red with hard eyes. Your hands fall to your sides, and you pat your pocket, making sure that Marcie’s medicine didn’t fall out in the scuffle. You don’t let yourself think about anything other than her pale face, wracked with fever, as you make your way into the trees, phaser still held in a white-knuckled fist.) 

You’re 22 and your backpedaling has gotten you nowhere.

You got your GED when you were 15 and angry, hitchhiking across the continent with nothing better to do. You got a PADD and took the test in half an hour en route to somewhere, tucked away out of sight with the cargo in the back of a long-distance cruiser. You get the results a few hours later: you got a perfect score. You set the PADD down, something like disappointment burning in your stomach. It doesn’t mean anything, you realize. It’s all just words; justifications, excuses, platitudes—school has never been about learning, it’s about _standardizing_ , and you’ve had all you can stomach of that. You start working instead—odd jobs at garages and family businesses that didn’t ask too many questions. You _learn_ —how to build a car, how to suture, how to wire a house, how to weld, how to put out fires, how to take apart a computer. You take almost every kind of job you can find, moving across the country at random, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. You manage to live like a nomad for 5 years before you start repeating jobs, feeling jittery and untethered. At 21, you wonder if you’ve burnt yourself out. You work at bars now, mostly—they’re used to temporary workers, and they’re a good outlet for the savagery you still carry around in your bones. On the night of your 22nd birthday you hop a cruiser to Riverside, _drawn like a salmon upstream_ , you think, 4 shots of Jack past coherent. You go to the only bar within 50 miles and find if crawling with reveling Starfleet cadets. It makes your stomach twist, the necklace you wear suddenly feeling like a 2-ton weight. But you just straighten your back, shouldering past kids bound for the stars, and plant your feet firmly at the bar, knocking back a few more shots. A girl appears in the periphery of your vision, catching your interest. She’s bright, glowing, incandescent with hope and promise and success. She is your antithesis, and you can’t resist provoking her. You have no real intentions beyond bantering with her, but like so many other things in your life, things quickly go downhill. Lying on the floor in a pool of your own blood and broken glass, you wonder if this is all you have to look forward to. A piercing whistle removes the fists from your shirt, and the next thing you know, you’re dabbing at the blood on your face with a napkin while a steely-faced, grey-haired man stares at you disapprovingly. The lines on his face speak to knowledge and experience—a life lived. You want him to tell you, _who am I, Captain Pike?_ Because all you have ever been so far is a disappointment, a ghost, and a liability. Your eyes close at his answer, grit your teeth, hands curling into fists. You don’t unclench until he walks out of the bar, speech delivered and conscience cleared. You lean back in your chair, feeling far older than 22, frayed and pulled tight as though you’d been around for centuries. You hear his _“I dare you to do better”_ echoing in your skull, and you hate that he was here tonight, with you at your weakest. You push the heels of your hands into your eye sockets until starbursts of light bloom behind your lids, trying to clear your mind. You think of your children on Tarsus and how you would’ve done—did do—anything to protect them. You think about having a ship full of crew to protect. You think of piloting your ship into the maw of another to give your crew time to escape, and you feel a sense of peace come over you. Yeah, you can do better. At least you won’t leave anyone behind. 


End file.
